Adobe Acrobat writer - how to make background permanent?
 

I am generating invoices from accounting software, as PDFs, but of course the resulting PDF does not contain the company letterhead - it's just a blank sheet.

The acrobat writer supports a 'background' i.e. an image file and this works perfectly, but the only opportunity to specify the background, and the file to use for it, is when each PDF has been generated. So, for every PDF, there are dozens of mouse clicks to specify the background.

I cannot find anywhere in the extensive acrobat config where a default background could be configured...

Take a look under Watermark in help. Hope this solves your problem

I cannot see where this setting can be made permanent. I am using Acrobat v7.09.

Any offers on this one?

My only thought is to use "Open Office Write" make your invoice a template, fill in the bits needed, then export the result as a PDF to where ever you want it.

I see your problem IO - I think

You can do a simple text letterhead with the watermark setting in print set up. (Well my printer has that facility)

The simple solution is to print your letterhead on a number of clean sheets and use those as your paper for the acrobat run. No mouse clicks required!

MC

MC - nice to see a bit of lateral thinking:D

In Acrobat 8 (and 7 as I recall), you can save a background within Acrobat and then reuse it later. If you want to apply the same background to a number of PDFs you can set up a Batch process to apply the background to a number of files and the you'll only have to specify the background settings once. Alternatively I'm sure you could do it in JavaScript but I'm not that up-to-speed with it to give a blow-by-blow list of how to do it.

There is no problem with pulling up a previously saved background, and applying it to the PDF. The problem is that the background file needs to be specified each time (from the usual file-open dialogue).

There are printers on which you can specify a permanent background, but Adobe PDF is not one of those (as far as I can see).

Curiously, we never actually save the PDF. We get the PDF generated, at which point Adobe Reader pops up showing the PDF, and we click on the Email button in the Reader and enter the customer's address.

The whole purpose of this is to email an invoice as a PDF. We don't keep the PDF ourselves.

Typically this process is used for Proforma invoices. The real invoices always go in the mail...

We prefer to fax proformas but a lot of people are too lazy to walk to their fax machine and they insist on the invoice being emailed... this also saves paper.